Verbal Humor in the Spanish Columns about the Language Diachronically: From the 19th Century until Now

Verbal humor can be part of the discursive strategies of texts that are not classified as humorous, whose function is not simply to make people laugh. This would be the case of the columns on language, considered as expository and argumentative texts, add opinion and metalinguistics. The objective of this work is to discover and analyze the presence of verbal humor in columns on languge diachronically from its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. For this, a corpus has been created with 11 columnists and a total of 530 columns, in which the purpose of using verbal humor in them has been studied, as well as the linguistic procedures that have made it possible (humorous markings and indicators). The result obtained is the consideration of verbal humor as a constituent element of the columns on language in its discursive tradition.